CHILDREN TEACHERS

CHILDREN TEACHERS

Teachers are usually older than their students and usually they have had more time ‘to prepare’. In the first years of life parents teach their children everything: “wave good-bye”, “it’s time we leave diapers and pass to a potty”. They teach them to speak, to write and do sums. Things are now changing. Forty percent of parents learn to use technological instruments (desktop, laptop, touch telephone etc.) from their kids. Recently a ten-year old child was telling me that as far as computers were concerned, his father was a lost cause. In fact, within 24 hours he would forget everything he (the son) had patiently taught him. A mother told me that after her daughter ‘explained’ Facebook to her, she spends a lot of time chatting with her sister and this helps her ‘soothe’ her nerves. In addition, as she is a hairdresser, she finds lots of new hairstyles on internet to propose to her clients. The classic models of who teaches and who learns the culture of the place where we live have been inverted. Very young people become ‘opinion leaders’ and the underlying required skill is to be able to move about a network with authority and competence. Little does it matter whether the opinion being broadcasted concerns a new nail varnish or theory on black holes. This inversion of educational positions changes traditional roles within family and society. For example, families may move into a new neighborhood but have difficulty settling in for linguistic, cultural and economic reasons. If the children attend a school where all the kids of that area go, the technological instruments they so naturally use become a way to enter the new community. In fact, the children introduce the entire family into the new community by showing them photos as they appear on their smart phones of how the various neighbors eat, speak, party and enjoy themselves.

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